


Of How Good Gingerbread Men were Sacrificed in the Name of Progress

by Quinara



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M, season: b5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-26
Updated: 2009-12-26
Packaged: 2017-10-05 07:14:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/39143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quinara/pseuds/Quinara
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So there were a lot of ideas going round during Christmas Season 5 - for a start Buffy was beginning to realise that Spike could help look after her family. But this Christmastime I think it's important we remember those little people at the heart of it all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of How Good Gingerbread Men were Sacrificed in the Name of Progress

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt from Bogwitch of Ghosts, Graveyards and Gingerbread. Cheers, Boggie!

Nice and balmy, the weather was, at least relative to what he’d grown up with. Just what you wanted on Christmas Eve: no worry about your toes dropping off, still the ability to enjoy an ice-cold beer in front of the telly, no lumpy clothes getting in your way when you went to change the channel. All in all, a pleasant evening in the shithole crypt he called home.

Christ, he was bored. And he had fucking Christmas songs going round his head.

Thankfully, just then there was a knock at his door, so Spike got out of his chair and ambled across the cobwebs to open it. He even had it half open before he remembered how odd it was for people to knock – some expectations were hard to shift, it seemed, even with the Slayer’s constant attempts to erode them.

Ah, the Slayer… For a moment the slightest glimmer of fantasy flickered in his mind, of Buffy all hot and bothered in those forest-green leather trousers she had, maybe a mini Santa hat pinned to her hair in the spirit of the season, come to propose a Christmas truce of a most interesting nature.

But it was her mum instead, apparently, with a Tupperware box in her mittened hands. Her cheeks had a charming rosy glow, but he imagined it was blusher rather than the supposed cold.

“Hello?” he said, quirking an eyebrow as he put his hands in his pockets.

“Oh, hello, Spike,” she replied. “Can I come in?”

“Er…” He wasn’t sure he was up for entertaining. Still, best he knew there wasn’t anything incriminating about. Or at least nothing that said outright, ‘I’m quite probably stalking your daughter’. “Yeah.”

“I’m sorry to bother you on Christmas Eve,” Joyce continued as he shut the doors behind them, leading her over to the chair. “I baked these for Rupert – ” She held up the box. “ – but Buffy forgot them when she went out.”

There were a few questions he could ask, but it wasn’t surprising which one he chose. “Slaying on Christmas Eve? Bit full-service, innit?” He settled back onto the sarcophagus, pulling his smokes from his pocket. “What’s the, er, Slayer fighting?” Maybe he could bump into her after all.

“I don’t know,” Joyce replied, frowning under her woolly hat. “The gang came over for cookies and eggnog, but then Rupert phoned to say there was trouble somewhere with a talisman in a tomb or something.” She looked remarkably cute, all bundled up and uncertain. Not that that was surprising; it hadn’t been an accident when Buffy’d come by her looks. “I thought Buffy had only gotten down to the end of the road, and it seemed nicer that Rupert would have his gingerbread for Christmas, rather than waiting till Tuesday, but when I got out there I found she’d gone farther than I thought…” She looked down to the biscuits and Spike thought that he could just make out some little gingerbread faces in the candlelight. They looked perplexed. “But, anyway, then I figured maybe you’d appreciate the cookies more.” She smiled after that, with the same wide-eyed sympathy that had almost made his drunken adventure in Sunnyhell two years ago worthwhile.

As the words sank in he sat there stunned, cigarette smouldering between his fingers. But then, God help him, he found he was actually touched. All right, so he was a complete afterthought and barely more than a footnote in Joyce’s no doubt extensive Christmas plans, but that was always going to be better than nothing at all.

“Well,” he said, staring at the suddenly proffered plastic tub. Might was well go for the rakish grin, he thought. “I can’t eat them on my own, can I?”

Joyce laughed, then took off her mittens, proceeding to very sensibly ease the lid off the box, freeing the gingerbread people into the balmy night air. He took one and bit its head off.

Bloody thoughtful was what this was, no doubt about it.

She didn’t stay long, because obviously she had Dawn and the others to get back to, but they got through a few of the populace and she left the tub behind without even a finger-wag that he should bring it back to her later. (He would, of course. Big Bads couldn’t have Tupperware hanging around.) And the fun didn’t stop there, because as they walked back down Revello they even ran into Buffy, who looked marvellously shagged out from Slaying. Though she was in jeans rather than her leathers. And had no mini Santa hat.

“Mom!” she said, stopping in front of them, just by his tree. “Where were you?” Her eyes met his momentarily, but then her gaze darted away. “Were you with _Spike_?” Strangely enough, his name came out something like a squeak. He kind of liked it.

“Your mum just nipped into my crypt for a bit,” he said, fidgeting to try and draw her attention back to him. “Wanted to warm her toes in the glow of PBS and that.”

Joyce of course said it better. “I took Spike some gingerbread,” she told her daughter. What a brilliant sentence.

It even made Buffy squeak again. “_Gingerbread?_” she asked, her face turning pink with something that was almost certainly not cold. How interesting.

“Did the Slaying go OK?” Joyce continued blithely. “All the bad guys, uh, slayed?”

“Oh yeah.” Buffy nodded quickly, apparently back on firmer ground. “Talisman smooshed; ghosts all gone.” She waved a hand through the air, apparently re-enacting the smooshing. “Christmas past, present and future poof, poof, poof. Minimal Scroogifying incurred.” She smiled, slightly unconvincingly.

It was odd, or perhaps not, but when for another second she met his eyes again he was suddenly filled with the realisation of what exactly one _could do_ with some gingerbread men, an inquisitive mind and a willing subject for experimentation. There was a lot of potential there, in particular to turn Buffy as red as she’d gone now.

Something to file away for the Christmas that might never come, he mused, with a twinkle in his eye.


End file.
